Cultural Deterioration Quotes

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

It is possible for great nations to rot from within.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

We are not far from the kind of moral decay that has brought on the fall of other nations and peoples.

… the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

The intellectual and moral character of the European is deteriorated by the mixture of black or red blood.

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.

What is called Western Civilization is in an advanced state of decomposition, and another Dark Ages will soon be upon us, if, indeed, it has not already begun. With the Media, especially television, governing all our lives, as they indubitably do, it is easily imaginable that this might happen without our noticing...by accustoming us to the gradual deterioration of our values.

America gives every appearance of being a nation besotted with trashiness - divorce, illegitimacy, casual Fridays.

That country [Carthage] was rapidly sinking into the state of barbarism from whence it had been raised by the Phoenician colonies and Roman laws; and every step of intestine discord was marked by some deplorable victory of savage man over civilized society.

It's too hard for me to comment on the sorry state of our culture.

The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.

Civilization is what makes you sick.

Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.

Barbarism recommences by the excess of civilization.

What greater calamity can fall upon a nation, than the loss of worship? Then all things go to decay. Genius leaves the temple, to haunt the senate, or the market. Literature becomes frivolous. Science is cold. The eye of youth is not lighted by the hope of other worlds, and age is without honor. Society lives to trifles, and when men die, we do not mention them.

My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

Like so many Americans, I am sick and tired of watching the rapid decline of our culture right in front of our eyes.

Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.

The community standards in New York are so low that nothing is obscene.

The world is turning into a cesspool of imbeciles.

The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture.

It seemed to me,' said Wonko the Sane, 'that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.